Peer-to-peer platforms such as Airbnb, Turo, TaskRabbit, Eatwith, and Uber are transnational market actors, generating millions of transactions, in multiple jurisdictions across the globe. These companies connect individuals and small businesses via online platforms and mediate transactions in the real, offline world between owners and renters, service providers and service recipients. Despite their clear importance and their market influence, the legal role of peer-to-peer platforms remains elusive. The emerging transnational legal order is a mixture of self-regulation and sporadic, concrete state or local regulation in several jurisdictions. I suggest thinking of platforms as transnational actors and offer a conceptualization of their legal role. Access platforms create and maintain a market with its own rules, conventions, and entry and exit points. To capture the role of platform as constituting a market, I rely on fiduciary law, an area of private law area concerned with power and vulnerability. This role creates duties toward the participants in this market. This duty explains why, for example, the platform should be responsible for the discriminatory actions of its participants. Other obligations include the duty to give prior notice before pulling out from an area of activity, and duty to create and maintain fair entry and exit rules.

This case study explores Uber and the sharing economy. Uber characterized itself as a technology platform that used a massive network, operational excellence, and product expertise to power mobility. By 2021, Uber was a multisided platform whose services included rides (Mobility), food delivery (Eats), and freight logistics (Freight). Accordingly, riders, eaters,merchants, delivery people, mobility drivers, shippers, and carriers constituted the sides of the platform. Its distinct capabilities included marketplace, routing, and payment technologies. In particular, the marketplace embedded proprietary demand prediction, matching, dispatching, and pricing technologies. In 2019, before the global pandemic, Uber facilitated almost 7 billion trips for 111 million monthly active platform consumers (riders and eaters), generating $65 billion in gross bookings and $13 billion in company revenue from trip commissions. Despite a healthy 20–30 percent annual revenue growth, the company posted a net loss of $8.5 billion. By 2021, Uber had not yet had a year where its revenue exceeded its cost of operations. The case discusses the reasons for the poor financial performance and the prospects for reaching profitability in the future.

In policy debates about the design of digital platforms, privacy has long been an issue of central importance. Understanding the antecedents and elements of privacy is particularly important in the context of sharing economy platforms that may manage highly sensitive information. This chapter proposes a comprehensive framework for addressing privacy concerns arising on sharing economy platforms. Our framework is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on information exchange and aims to classify all possible information exchanges that take place on sharing economy platforms. In the second part, we examine how platform users may use privacy calculus to make decisions about which information exchanges (i.e., accepted information exchanges) they wish to participate in. We conclude by highlighting the role of information transparency and privacy literacy and suggesting directions for future research.

The current sharing economy suffers from system-wide deficiencies even as it produces distinctive benefits and advantages for some participants. The first generation of sharing markets has left us to question: Will there be any workers in the sharing economy? Can we know enough about these technologies to regulate them? Is there any way to avoid the monopolization of assets, information, and wealth? Using convergent, transdisciplinary perspectives, this volume examines the challenge of reengineering a sharing economy that is more equitable, democratic, sustainable, and just. The volume enhances the reader’s capacity for integrating applicable findings and theories in business, law and social science into ethical engineering design and practice. At the same time, the book helps explain how technological innovations in the sharing economy create value for different stakeholders and how they impact society at large. Reengineering the Sharing Economy is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The sharing economy is transformative in that it decentralizes services by permitting direct transactions between individuals. A less recognized consequence is that it also decentralizes the geography of services, shifting their distribution away from major business districts and into residential communities. We present a three-part generalized theory for studying and developing policy responses to the arrival of these services in neighborhoods where they were not previously available. First, one must quantify the distribution of the new services across neighborhoods. Second, these geographic shifts in supply and demand can generate positive and negative externalities for communities, which might be hypothesized and tested for empirically. Third, policy responses can be developed based on the knowledge generated by components 1 and 2. We illustrate this proposed theory by examining the incursion of Airbnb short-term rentals into the neighborhoods of Boston, MA for 2010 to 2018. We demonstrate that Airbnb listings quickly grew into neighborhoods away from the downtown core where hotels are concentrated and hypothesize how this might increase investment in local buildings (measured through building permits), activity at local food establishments (measured through the number of new licenses), and crime (measured through 911 reports). We find initial evidence for increased investment through building permits and limited evidence for increased violent crime, but no evidence for increases in food establishments. This can then guide how cities regulate short-term rentals to maximize benefits and minimize negative impacts. We conclude by exploring how the theory might be applied to other forms of the sharing economy.

Any consideration of property law must begin with the nature of property and how we should understand its conceptual underpinning.

The law is primarily a practical and pragmatic science directed to confronting and responding to practical issues and challenges in human affairs, dealings, and transactions. Many existing approaches to property law begin with an attempt to explain the conceptual contours of property and property law and to lay out its philosophical basis, proceeding to analyse these conceptual components and the law’s part in constructing the mosaic of property and its legal underpinnings. In the modern Australian context, this necessarily involves a detailed investigation and analysis of both myriad legislation and caselaw. While this strategy has stood the test of time and is reflected in the following chapters, this book seeks to position the discussion, explanation, and analysis within a context of two overarching themes. First, to explain and systematically integrate the effects and implications of technology upon property and property law. Second, to present a narrative which moves readers from property law principles to the practice of property law in all its applications.

Brothers often chose to remain together after their father's death, sharing the house and its furnishings, while pursuing common or separate enterprises. Such practices accorded well with advice and aspirations for continued family sharing. However, brothers' contributions were not so easily balanced, and eventually many fraternal households came to a division of assets, for which legal personnel, notaries and lawyers, were essential. Liabilities, which had nominally been shared while together, were also subject to division or denial. Jurists demanded an absolute standard (no separate accounting of holdings, earnings, and expenses) in order to hold liabilities in common. Here the legal presumptions of individual ownership proved deep-seated.

In late medieval and Renaissance Italian societies, family was conceived as a quasi-corporate entity, continuing across generations. But in law ownership was conceived as an attribute of individuals, and generally of only one person in a household, the paterfamilias. Legal experts worked to accommodate legal notions to the realities of family life, which were close to what anthropologists have come to term an economy of sharing (with multiple and overlapping rights). Law thus came to provide instruments that helped perpetuate families or terminate them. It fell to the paterfamilias to manage property and use legal instruments to do so in order that the patrimony, substantia, could be transmitted to the next generation.

1. To identify the different international expansion trajectories of newly established firms, namely, international new ventures (INVs).

2. To explain how entrepreneurs who establish INVs identify gaps in the present servicing of foreign markets and then exploit these gaps, inter alia, through usage of digital-assets-based business models.

3. To acknowledge that viable, ‘sharing economy’ business models can include the cross-border entrepreneurial initiatives of start-ups.

4. To consider how globally oriented entrepreneurs craft value chains that from the outset target access to requisite resources in distant environments.

5. To recognize that many of the normative recommendations made for INVs to be successful are subject to strong qualifications: especially the bounded rationality and bounded reliability challenges at play should never be underestimated.

While gig-based work is marketed by platforms as an attractive opportunity, little attention has been paid to the long-term experience of gig workers. Based on longitudinal interviews with 11 gig workers, this chapter seeks to answer the question, what is the impact of gig economy work on a worker’s future career trajectory and personal life? To paraphrase Kalleberg (2011), is gig-based work a good or bad job? What distinguishes those workers who move out of gig work from those workers who remain engaged in gig work, whether by choice or circumstance? Do workers think that extensive time spent in gig work as a primary source of income has affected their ability to move to stable traditional employment? This chapter connects gig work to a larger discussion of “side hustles” and worker reliance on additional sources of income, and the impact of underemployment on wages and employment call-backs. The negative career implications of gig work, especially long-term gig work, suggest serious inequities in regards to worker opportunity or experience. These inequities should be cause for concern among labor and employment law scholars, and further support the importance of establishing a social safety net and workplace protections for gig workers.

This chapter offers an overview of the legal and regulatory landscape impacting gig work in America. It covers recent developments in case law and legislation at city, state, and federal levels, as well as regulatory activity involving administrative actors like the National Labor Relations Board. The legal landscape described here provides the background for the chapters that follow. It argues that there are in fact far fewer laws regulating gig work than one might expect because of the newness of this type of labor exchange, preemption rules that make it difficult for local (and sometimes state) authorities to regulate work, and because non-work issues – consumer protection, taxation, urban infrastructure – have tended to occupy regulators’ attention.

When companies like Uber and TaskRabbit appeared in Silicon Valley, there was a collective media swoon over these new app-based service-delivery corporations and their products. Pundits and journalists made it seem like these companies were ushering in not only an inevitable future, but a desirable one. Their content helped convince the public and regulators that these businesses were different from existing corporations – that they were startups with innovative technology platforms designed to disrupt established firms by efficiently connecting consumers to independent, empowered gig workers. Those in the media normalized and at times generated this rhetoric and framing, which was then taken up by politicians, amplified by academics, and finally enshrined in laws that legalized the business models of these companies. The positive, uncritical coverage prevailed for years and helped pave the way for a handful of companies that represent a tiny fraction of the economy to have an outsized impact on law, mainstream corporate practices, and the way we think about work. The force that powered the swoon was a relatively new and journalistically problematic trend in media: “tech” reporting.

This chapter reaches more ambiguous conclusions with regard to the natural monopoly features of ride-hailing platforms such as Uber. While ride-hailing service providers benefit from indirect network externalities between drivers and passengers, which therefore represent a potential source of natural concentration on the demand side, their force is not infinite, and is likely to taper off after a thick and sufficiently large network is reached. The possibility of natural monopoly is as a result largely dependent on the local conditions of demand in a given geographical market. Given these more ambiguous conclusions, this chapter evaluates alternative policy approaches that may be pertinent to ride-hailing depending on the strength of natural concentration, including regulation, franchise bidding, and competition policy enforcement.